Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another video on forgotten weapons. I'm Ian.
I'm here today at the James Julia auction house up in Maine taking a look at some of the guns they have for sale, coming
up in March of 2015. I'm really excited about the video that
I'm doing today because I've been waiting for a chance to get my hands on a couple of these pistols
Well, frankly, I've been waiting for a chance to get my hands on one of them
And I happen to have two at my disposal here to show you guys which is really cool these are
Gabbett-Fairfax Mars pistols these were for, quite a long time actually, the most powerful self-loading pistols
manufactured
These went into initial production in 1898
they were the brainchild of a british man named Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax who looks as British as his name sounds. And
they are a phenomenally powerful and ridiculously complex handgun.
Mechanically they are long recoil with four lug rotating bolts, so...
They're just weird to start with.
They were designed for four different cartridges the eight-
And they're all proprietary cartridges designed by Gabbett-Fairfax for these pistols. There was an 8.5 millimeter
There was a 9 millimeter, which is equivalent to .38 or .36 caliber.
There was a .45 short and .45 long. Now the 45 long is the most powerful of the batch it fired
a 220 grain bullet at no less than 1,200 feet per second which is basically equivalent to .45 Winchester magnum.
And he was doing this in a pistol made around 1900, which is really quite the achievement.
Now I mentioned they're long recoil pistols. They have rotating bolts. The very first ones were manufactured actually by the Webley company
Gabbett-Fairfax had a partnership with them to do these pistols, but it didn't last very long.
Webley built the first prototypes, and then they really wanted to make some modifications to make these guns actually commercially viable
Which would have meant making them smaller and less powerful, and frankly, it would have been the right thing to do to actually get them
on the market, and Gabbett-Fairfax was not interested in that. He broke up the partnership.
He continued making the pistols on his own until about 1903. During that time
he made 56 of them. Now, from 1901 until 1903, these guns had no fewer than eight
demonstrations and trials with the British military,
both the the Army and the Royal Navy.
And they pretty much told him the same thing every time. They pretty much always said the guns are too big, they have too much recoil,
they're too powerful, and they're too complicated. And what they wanted him to do, was make them smaller.
And he just frankly wouldn't listen to them, which is a bit unfortunate. As a result, they were never adopted by the British military
By 1903, Gabbett-Fairfax was completely out of money.
Flat broke, the company dissolved. His creditors took over the company,
recreated it with the- they were hoping that they'd be able to take the leftover parts and the tooling and the production facilities, and
they hoped they could do better,
they could manufacture pistols and actually sell them.
They made a go of that until 1907, when that effort also went bankrupt and folded, and after that, that was it.
By that time, there were a total of about 80 made.
Now the two we have here are numbers 41 and 54.
What's really interesting about these pistols, is they never went into mass production,
in fact interestingly none of the ones that have been found
have been proof marked, which suggests that none of them ever got into commercial sale.
So some would have been used as military test pistols, some would have been given away to
wealthy or important people,
but none of them were ever actually sold. The manufacturing facility for these was very close to one of the proof houses,
and it's extremely unlikely, given the
the severity of the enforcement of British proofing law, that any of these guns could have been sold without being proofed, so...
The other interesting thing, is that because they went it never went into mass production, they're all basically handmade, and
every single gun is just a little bit different than every other one.
I don't think you could probably interchange most of the parts between any of these pistols.
They're both hand-fitted and slightly redesigned. We'll take a look at that in a minute,
just between two guns that are thirteen serial numbers apart. There are a whole bunch of
small, but not trivial, differences.
So, let's bring the camera back here, because I'm really excited to show you guys how these things work, because they're crazy cool.
All right, so one of the cool things about the Mars pistols is, of course, that they're all slightly different.
These are only 13 serial numbers apart, and yet, you can see some differences
in them. For example, this lightening hole
is significantly different on both guns.
You can see, let's take a look before we flip them over, the pins and this screw
are pretty much identical on the two. Keep that in mind.
The front sight style is different on both guns.
This one has a grip safety on it,
This one does not. In fact, This is the only one with a grip safety
I've ever been aware of. If you look at this area right here, in the frame, on
this gun, this tab comes out a little farther than it does over here.
Just a lot of little, subtle differences like that.
If we look on this side, you can see the same sort of difference in this milled area. Here and here.
You notice that these pins
were identical on the opposite side, but over here, they're significantly different.
They're, all three, up on this raised section on the .45; on the eight and a half millimeter, one of them is down.
So you've got that sort of thing going on.
Now, within the individual guns,
start with the .45 caliber because it's huge and fantastic,
this guy weighs three pounds, five ounces, it's a very hefty pistol, the ergonomics are not terrible,
but it's kind of like shooting a cinder block (not great).
Big hammer back here. These are single action only, so you cock the hammer, and then we can open the bolt.
You can see here, we have a four lug,
rotating bolt. Now, these bits that just lift it up, right there, down and back up,
those are your cartridge grabbers. So,
the way those work,
They take a cartridge from this magazine, which you'll notice is totally different than a normal magazine,
they grab a cartridge from the back, around the rim, pull it out backwards,
and then lift it up, and the bolt pushes it into the chamber.
So if you look at this again...
Opening it up, there's the bolt, there's our lifter right there.
That's down, and then it's actually pushed on by the hammer
acting as the force to lift
those two lifters up.
Now once they're up, when the bolt goes forward, it catches the round, pushes it into the chamber, and
then rotates
to lock.
So that's the second half of the feed cycle. The first half is,
actually, since this is long recoil, the whole barrel assembly
recoils backwards. This has a very strong spring, actually it has two springs. Each one of these
lobes has a recoil spring in it, so...
So, before I pull this back, I want to explain something which
describes why we can actually keep the gun open like this.
You can see the cartridge comes out of the magazine, lifts up, and then gets pushed into the barrel.
One of the problems they had in some of the early production guns, is that because of the tremendous recoil from this gun, as
the lifter came back it was oscillating up and down
and as it went forward sometimes it would
hit too high on the back of the barrel and jam, and sometimes it would hit too low and jam
and sometimes it would go right into the chamber
The mechanism that Gabbett-Fairfax came up with to solve that problem, was to actually put a disconnecter in,
such that as long as you held the trigger down,
the bolt would stay locked back and open, and when you released the trigger, then the bolt would go forward
The idea being, any typical shooter would have enough delay
in their trigger pull, that by the time they released the trigger, that
oscillation of the cartridge would have dampened down, and it would feed more reliably. And, frankly, that actually worked. It sounds
remarkable that it wasn't just more of a disaster.
But that solution actually worked. What that also means, is that as long as I hold the trigger down,
I can open the barrel, and then show you the open action. So, I'm going to
drop the hammer, and hold the trigger down, and then,
there's a really strong
recoil spring, in this. As long as I don't rotate the bolt, I can open it here.
There we go. Alright, this is full recoil travel of the barrel and bolt assembly.
You can see we've got all sorts of stuff
sticking out over the back of the shooter's wrist.
This was one of the complaints that the British government had when they tested this pistol, is that the thing basically exploded out the back
of the gun every time you fired, and this was rather unnerving to the guys doing the testing. Now, when I rotate
these two handles, that will rotate the locking lugs, which will unlock the bolt.
Now if I was actually firing, this would be done automatically,
but because I'm dry-cycling the weapon, I can wait, and do it by hand
right here, so now the bolt -the barrel- will go forward under its recoil spring
like that. Now, we can see the whole action locked open.
As I push on the lifters here, you can see the hammer moves down here.
That's because the hammer spring is actually being used, with the hammer, as a lever, to push this cartridge lifter up.
So this would have grabbed a cartridge around its rim and...
See, right...
See two grooves right there? That's where the rim of the cartridge would be held, and then you can see the semicircular profile
there, that would be grabbing around the body of the case.
That holds it in place.
Then when I release the trigger,
this bolt assembly is going to go forward, and what it would do with a live round, is push it forward,
out of this lifter, into the chamber, push it all the way forward, and then lock.
So, you can see, I can rotate
these, just a little bit still. We have a four lug
rotating bolt there, we've got our extractor here.
Ridiculously complex action, but, let's go ahead, and I will now release the trigger... (satisfying click)
And, it goes into battery. Now it's ready for the next shot.
So that is how the Mars pistol works. Or rather how it functions, because whether or not it works, is kind
of a question.
It doesn't always work.
I mentioned that these were in no fewer than eight different military trials.
They never did all that well. Part of that is due to the fact that they always, they consistently had problems with ammunition supply,
they were always getting bad lots of ammunition,
underpowered, overpowered,
brass that wasn't made right, that would fracture. That really did not help Gabbett-Fairfax' efforts to market this gun, both
commercially and militarily.
But you can't blame it entirely on the ammunition, because these guns are so hideously complex
That it's kind of insane to think that they would ever have worked reliably.
So this one, this is in 8.5 millimeter. It works exactly the same way.
So we can rotate the locking lugs to open the bolt here,
confirm that it is unloaded, now...
(fiddles with the gun)
There we go. Fully into battery. Now I'm going to do the same thing. We're going to
open this, if I can.
There we go.
So, there is our bolt locked open because I'm holding the trigger down. You can see, mechanically, this works exactly the same way.
So I pull the hammer back, you can see that lifter go up and down.
So it'd pull a cartridge out of the magazine down here, lift it up, and then push it forward
into the chamber.
Here we go. There we are, ready to go again, hammer cocked
Thanks for watching, guys. I really hope you enjoyed the video as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
It's really neat to be able to get a close look at a couple of these.
Fantastically complex and very steampunk-ish pistols. These of course are both for sale,
so if you are in the market for one, and who wouldn't be,
you have your chance at both of them, they are individual lots,
so you get two chances at one.
If you click the link below, that'll take you to the James Julia auction company catalog where you can take a look at their high-res
pictures, and their descriptions, and estimated values.
Specifically these are lots 2259 and 2260, so you can look them up by those numbers.
And I really hope these go to some cool people who really appreciate them. Thanks for watching.